ABSTRACT

Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture advances debates on digital culture and digital religion in two complementary ways. First, by focalizing the themes ‘ontology,’ ‘ethics’ and ‘transcendence,’ it builds on insights from research on digital religion in order to reframe the field and pursue an existential media analysis that further pushes beyond the mandatory focus in mainstream media studies on the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of digitalization. Second, the collection also implies a broadening of the scope of the debate in the field of media, religion and culture – and digital religion in particular – beyond ‘religion,’ to include the wider existential dimensions of digital media. It is the first volume on our digital existence in the budding field of existential media studies.

chapter |25 pages

Digital existence

An introduction

part I|88 pages

Media ontologies

chapter 1|32 pages

Irremediability

On the very concept of digital ontology

chapter 2|20 pages

Umwelt and individuation

Digital signals and technical being

chapter 3|19 pages

Thrownness, vulnerability, care

A feminist ontology for the digital age

chapter 4|15 pages

Digital unworld(s)

The Bielefeld Conspiracy

part II|72 pages

Being human

chapter 5|20 pages

You have been tagged

Magical incantations, digital incarnations and extended selves 1

chapter 8|16 pages

The ethics of digital being

Vulnerability, invulnerability, and ‘dangerous surprises’

part III|77 pages

Transcendence

chapter 9|21 pages

The internet is always awake

Sensations, sounds and silences of the digital grave

chapter 11|15 pages

Cybernetic animism

Non-human personhood and the internet

chapter 12|22 pages

Death in life and life in death

Forms and fates of the human

chapter |14 pages

Afterword